Is it 'naval diplomacy' or gearing up for war?

Imanuddin Razak, Jakarta

The fresh tension between Indonesia and neighbor Malaysia over claims to a border area of the oil-and-gas-rich blocks of Ambalat in the Sulawesi sea has significantly subdued following Jakarta's commitment to withdraw five of the seven Indonesian warships from the area on Tuesday.

However, the move does not necessarily mean that the potential conflict between the two countries of the same ancestral origin is completely over. The withdrawal of warships was due to Indonesia's willingness to try to settle the dispute through diplomatic channels, rather than pursuing a show of military supremacy.

The warships withdrawal followed an agreement between leaders of the two countries to send their foreign ministers to Jakarta for talks to settle the dispute on Wednesday.

Indonesia previously dispatched seven warships and four F-16 jet fighters for closer surveillance of two deep-water concession blocks that Malaysia is claiming as part of its territory. Hundreds of soldiers and thousands of others were ready for deployment to the disputed area to counter the presence of Malaysian warships and patrol planes there.

The dispute emerged after Malaysia's state-owned oil company Petronas awarded production sharing contracts to Shell in the blocks last month. Jakarta protested Malaysia's claim over the territory, but to no avail.

Meanwhile, Indonesia has since 1980 declared the blocks as its territory based on the Djuanda Declaration in 1957, which was in 1959 upheld by the United Nations through its Sea Law Convention. In 1999, Indonesia granted an oil-drilling concession in one of the blocks to ENI of Italy and the other block to UNOCAL of the United States.

The current tension is not the first in the countries' history. The first conflict was in 1961 following the division of Borneo island into four regions: Kalimantan which belongs to Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam and two British colonies Sarawak and Sabah, which later joined Malaysia.

The prolonged conflict only ended in October 1965 when Army general Soeharto replaced founding president Sukarno, which was followed by an official ending of the conflict in a conference in Bangkok in May 1966.

The second conflict, which was longer than the former, actually started in the early 1900s when both Indonesia and Malaysia were still under the occupation of the Netherlands and Britain, respectively. The second conflict centered around the dispute over the claim of ownership of the Sipadan-Ligitan islands.

The dispute came to a head in 1969 but was not settled until 1997 when both countries agreed to bring the conflict to the International Court of Justice. And Indonesia lost the legal battle on Dec. 17, 2002 when the Court declared Malaysia the legitimate owner of the two islands.

Still recovering from the bitter loss in the 2002 legal battle, Indonesia is reeling again from the fresh dispute over the "economically promising" oil and gas blocks. Quite annoyed with the ongoing expulsion of illegal Indonesian workers from Malaysia, the fresh dispute over the blocks has raised anti- Malaysian sentiments in many parts of the country, suggesting the people's readiness to go to war with Malaysia to settle the latest border conflict.

And although it is very unlikely that Indonesia will launch a military offensive against Malaysia, armed conflict is not an impossibility either, especially when observing third party interests in the blocks' rich oil and gas potential.

A rough estimate of both countries' military might puts Indonesia and Malaysia at relatively equal strength, meaning that there would be no eventual winner should there be armed conflict. The only difference will be in the number of troops that each country has, with Indonesia having the benefit of a greater number of personnel. It has been reported that Indonesia has some 250,000 troops, while Malaysia has less than 200,000 military personnel.

In view of the fact that there will be no winner should Indonesia and Malaysia decide to go to war, they should also bear in mind that any decision to go to war will not benefit either country at all and will only bring more suffering to the people, especially to Indonesians who have yet to completely recover from the equally crippling political and economic crisis.

And people would hate to see war, which is universally understood as a last resort in settling disputes between countries when diplomacy fails, occur.

The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.